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The Haunted Painting on Ebay
According to one source, Marley died within a year of purchasing the painting. He died in 1984, so I’m not entirely sure this is accurate, but for the purposes of making this all a little eerier, why not? The painting was allegedly found by its next owners on the site of an old brewery in California. How it got there, I don’t know (Satan, perhaps?), but when the couple that owned it tried to sell it on eBay, they said that it carried with it a curse. They claimed that the characters in the painting moved around at night. They would sometimes leave the painting and enter the room in which it was hanging at night. Into their home. Now, I’m no art expert, but if characters from a painting were strolling off the canvas and flipping through my DVD collection, I would not be selling the thing on eBay. I would be burning it in my back yard immediately. The house might need to go up too, I don’t know. I’ve been told I overreact sometimes. They included a series of photographic “evidence” of an incident in which the doll-girl was threatening the boy with a pistol, forcing him to try to leave the painting. Here, see if this convinces you. The sellers stated that would not be held liable for anything that was to happen to the soul who won the auction. The rumor travelled around the web-wide-world, and before long the auction page had over 30,000 hits. Some people claimed that just viewing the painting made them feel ill, or have some sort of unpleasant experience. I’m sure that’s what every artist wants to hear, that their work made people ill. And hear about it he did. The Perception Gallery (who cast the winning bid) contacted Bill Stoneham and told him about the auction stories. Bill was rather surprised by the general weirdness surrounding the painting, though he did remark that both the owner of the gallery in which the painting was originally displayed and the reporter from the LA Times who reviewed the show had died within a year of its public reveal. How ominous! Except that Bill still paints and sells his work through a very professional-looking website, and he clearly still works in the surrealist realm. This could just be his way of adding to the mystique, which couldn’t be bad for business. The story is published on his own website, with nothing offered to support the facts. He also includes a link in case you wanted to buy your own print of the painting. You know, for your guest bedroom. Bill also mentions on that page that Marley bought the painting at the LA exhibition, so that does away with the story that he died within a year of acquiring it. Oh, and the gun? That was a “battery and a tangle of wires” that the doll was holding, and the windowpane between her and the boy gave the impression of a weapon.